Mars, Tonight
by Cail M
Summary: Hermione home on summer break climbs into a treehouse in the dark, and strange thoughts ensue.


  
  
Reduisite Disclaimer: I do not own, do not claim to own, and do not think I own the characters from J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter Series. Yes, thank you.  
Note: Referance is made to a same-sex relationship, if that's going to ruin your day, don't read this story. I'm posting this on a wild urge to post /something/, it's been finished for a long time, but finished in a weird place so it could be longer, it could go on some more, but it probably won't. Without more ado, here 'tis!   
  
  
Mars, Tonight   
  
  
She spread her hands and gazing between her fingers, she could see the ceiling through the V's of her hands. The ceiling was a greenish white, the color of the green nightlight in the guestroom, nothing so dramatic as moonlight streaming through the window, stained green with fluttering walnut leaves, though the leaves framing the window hid some of the sky and most of the stars.   
  
She wiggled the tips of her fingers and thought of the most upsetting piece of magic she could cast, in the middle of the night in a strange house, but nonetheless familiar house. Something which made a lot of noise would be good.   
  
Transfiguring a bed into an elephant wouldn't necessarily make the elephant trumpet, wouldn't necessarily make the floor buckle. And she couldn't do that anyway, so she couldn't think of anything that would really disturb the sleep of her relative.   
  
Oh well. But it would have been nice to wake everyone up, so she didn't have stare at the ceiling knowing she was the only one awake in the whole house, possibly the whole county, probably the whole world.   
  
She wondered if there was really a spell that would make everyone restless and sleepless. She wiggled her toes and sighed, hot air, hot breath, hot sigh. The heat dulled everything, even her thoughts.   
  
She found herself becoming more tangled up in her blue sheets with the grey sheep on them so she threw off her flannel shackles and rolled out of bed, hitting the rug next to the bed softly.   
  
She picked up her robe from the floor, and shrugged into it. It still smelled like home, or Hogwarts, she couldn't quite tell. It certainly wasn't contaminated by the muddy smell of her Aunt and Uncle, and the mildewing scent of the house, wrapped up inside the smell of rotting black walnuts. It had rained every day since she had arrived, but it had remained hot. The world was a wet furnace, and all the trees were lush with leaves, but the poor walnuts were dropping their heavy nuts, still green with husks to the ground, months before they were supposed to. The fallen walnuts languished on the ground, getting nibbled on my worms and kicking around by her younger cousins. Her younger cousins.   
  
She snuggled her robe closer around her arms but she had no doubt that in a few days even her clothing would be usurped, and one or the other cousin would be parading around in pretending to be a king or a princess.   
  
She walked to the window, pushing up the sash and contorting her body so she was half out the window, an awkward way to stand, even for a little while, let alone a way to stand in the night, in the wet summer night wind that made her cough and choke, gripping the sill with her hands and bracing herself with her arched back.   
  
Her bare feet were cold against the bare floorboards, and her head was hot and thick with the humid night air. How could it be so hot at night and still rain every day?   
  
She climbed slowly out the window and into the walnut tree. Her sudden weight on the branch caused a short shower of droplets clinging to the branch above her to fall, some of them landing on the back of her neck. She hissed with the fierce joy of escape.   
  
It was a running joke in her family that her bedroom was equipped with a convenient sneaking-out tree because she would never use it. The cousins and the invasive aunts, the condescending uncles and her own silly parents all laughed and told the joke. 'Hermione's is the bedroom up in the corner, with that wonderful sneaking-out tree there, and you can climb up on the roof, but we can trust her.'   
  
Yes, trust her to be boring and sensible and mature and--why was /that/ so funny? Just because she was clever and practical didn't mean she was no fun, and it certainly didn't give them any right to make fun of her.   
  
She felt herself getting choked and upset just thinking about it in the dark. With her hands on the sash, it welled up in her throat. She was passionately certainly that /nothing/ gave another person the right to laugh at you like you were an idiot, or worse, an alien. But they laughed and giggled and chuckled at her precocious maturity and sense of responsibility, they teased her, their big teeth smiling in their pale lips. She touched her tongue to her own teeth, unconcerned except for their awful family resemblance.   
  
She climbed down from the tree, the bark hurting her bare fingers, almost splintering into her skin and digging under her fingernails.   
  
The climb was hard, odd in the dark, jostly, and blind because she had her eyes shut. Not that the moon would have given much light anyway but that--that was a moot point. When you keep your eyes quite tight shut in the dark it might /not/ be dark when you open them. Hermione played that game very often when she was younger, hiding from the many monsters hunting her in the night. Eyes shut and head under blanket made for a safe, stifling night.   
  
She had a plan of where she was going, though she didn't realize until her feet touched the ground. She squelched in the soft grass under the tree, and tiptoed across the spongey lawn, looking for another tree. It was hard to find in the dark, and she stepped on several slimy walnuts before she found herself at the trunk of the maple.   
  
There were wooden rungs hammered into the tree, and once she'd gotten her feet up on one, she had to grope in the dark above for another. If only she had a free hand she would have thought to use her wand to light the way, but she made her way up the tree trunk steadily.   
  
Hermione bumped her head, hard, on the trapdoor, which was also hard. She let go of the tree-rung with her right hand, for a moment, holding the top of her head, shocked and a little pleased at the ringing sensation between her ears. 'My brain is loose.' She decided, and pushed up on the trapdoor, gingerly.   
  
It squeaked and swung back on rust-crusty hinges. The treehouse was only three years old, but that amounted to a lot of rainy nights. The roof had a leak, she could tell as she soon put her palms against the damp floor, where the week of rain had left it thick with algae-green lichens.   
  
She felt thick. The pain in her head and the mossy wet wood mold on her hands made her both infuriated and feel in desperate need of a bath.   
  
There was something about family, she decided in the delirium of night, that makes life that much harder. Especially cousins and aunts and uncles kind of family, people who knew all your secrets, but you were still supposed to be on good behavior for. Like friends, only more inclined to yell and criticize and tease and make themselves nuisances.   
  
She touched the brim of the floor, and climbed into the treehouse with an 'oomph' of effort. She shut the trapdoor quickly, having all too vivid images dance through her head of a great fall in the dark through the open hole. She touched a wall, felt her way down, and crouched against it. She patted the pockets of her robe, now hanging, in folds loose around her knees.   
  
She turned on the flashlight by twisting the cold metal head, and then there was light. She twisted it off, almost immediately, trying to catch her breath in the dark, it was too early for a dawn, even an artificial flashlight dawn.   
  
She lay panting in the humid dark, for a moment, breathing in the heavy dank tree and wood rot smell surrounding her. She twisted her body into a more comfortable slump and turned on the flashlight again, fascinated by all the feelings an ordinary /flashlight/ stirred in her. She danced her fingers in front of it, making a dim shadow on the opposite wall. She shrugged her shoulders a little and struggled out of the confines of her robe. Stupid idea to wear /that/ anyway, she gave a small hiss that fell between her front teeth.   
  
Flashlights made her remember a good summer, far from this one and almost picturesque with hindsight and childish exuberance. She had gone camping with her parents and a friend, when she was eight-or had she been seven, at the time? She couldn't remember now. She had the time of her life, even when it rained and the fire went out and they had cold beans straight from the can for dinner. When it rained, they had to hunch under plastic tarps for shelter, and cover their tents with the plastic, securing it with a whole bag of clothespins. The girls had their own tents and with their flashlights turned on and shaded by their fingers had made strange fingerprints on the sides of their tent that night. After her parents had wished them sweet dreams they stayed up all night giggling over nothing, together.   
  
Hermione shifted, uncomfortable again, as though she had wizard money in the pocket she was sitting on. She didn't like to think about how wise she had been, to laugh at nothing, when she was eight, young and doomed. What a pointless memory anyway.   
  
"What a melodramatic way of putting it..." she hissed through her teeth again, for good measure. 'as long as I'm talking to myself I might as well really go all out and crazy.' she figured.   
  
"Young and doomed?" She repeated, finding the words scintillating and ridiculous in the dark and small hour.   
  
She listened to her heart beat. Beat-dub-dah-, beat-dub-da, beat-dub-dah. She got up, disgusted with herself, when she realized that she was really waiting for something to happen. Waiting for the treehouse to collapse, or someone to apparate into her life, or waiting for the sky to fall, or possibly all three and more.   
  
She squared her shoulders as well she could, with her head ducked low to keep from bumping the ceiling. She picked up the robe she had shimmied out of and dropped fto the floor, ready to leave again, done with her pity-party and ready to face a summer of no magic, just the endless muggy vacation season. With family.   
  
She decided it would be a hassle to climb down the tree with the robe in her arms, so she stood up, stooped and awkwardly hauling it around her shoulders. She straightened the robe by sticking her hands in the pockets; a long line of wrinkles fell out of the tangled black cloth.   
  
Her fingers clutched around something solid and square, in her pocket. It felt secret and heavy, like a padlock. For a long time, without the light, she couldn't remember what it was. She hadn't worn these robes since the end of the school year and what then--oh... oh wait, no, she knew what it was....   
  
****  
  
Seamus wore green nail polish the last week of school; he said it was because the Ireland Quidditch team had just won a match against Bulgaria. Which wasn't precisely the way he'd had put it, since it doesn't include a long description of the match, which lasted two and a half days, the last half in the pouring rain, also left out where the hushed admiring comments about "asskicking" and the patriotic singing.   
  
There was something about the way he kept winking at people in the hall and waving the tips of his fingers at them, though, that didn't seem to have anything to do with Quidditch. It all made Hermione sick to her stomach with the certainty that she had been completely left out of yet another joke.   
  
They stood alone in the common room, frowning at each other.   
  
"What are you doing back here?" Actually it was only Hermione who was frowning, Seamus seemed happy and excited, his voice was high pitched with that note of excitement.   
  
"I left my--"   
  
Seamus interrupted with a rude giggle. "/Really/? Wow, and I thought you were /organized/."   
  
Hermione stared at Seamus, who kept snickering at her, without a rhyme or reason she could see.   
  
"Why did you paint your nails?" Hermione had her arms crossed tight over her chest, like a barred door. None shall pass until the password is spoken. Or the answer given.   
  
Seamus lifted his head and listed to the side, quite prepared to leap over the door instead of going through it. But the password was very simple, so he licked his tongue and gasped, "Code." Grinning at her and expecting safe passage.   
  
Hermione waited for something more, but nothing came and nothing came, and she kept waiting. "Oh?"   
  
"Code. It's really simple though." he waved his fingers at her and winked--gulp, what was /wrong/ with the boy? "I offered to do everyone's but only a few people agreed." He shook himself and shivered like a wet cat drying itself. There was something strange about his eyes. "Justin Fince-Fletchly has green fingernails. And--Ginny."   
  
Hermione shrugged, "I didn't know Justin was interested in Quidditch." Seamus cheeks pulled in taut, making his face a rounded triangle. "He's not." He seemed desperate for Hermione to catch on to something awfully simple. "It's /code/."   
  
"What color are your eyes?" he asked, just as suddenly as anything else.   
  
"What?"   
  
Seamus stepped closer, bringing his face alarming close to Hermione. Little warning bells and whistles charged through her alarm system. She didn't usually let people so close to her. She looked at him hard, and it suddenly struck her that his behavior was oddly familiar. Her uncle--at some family party or another, had gotten swimmingly tipsy, and cornered her to talk about 'that school' of hers and how she was getting along there. Seamus was acting like that, swimming in his own eyes, scatter-brained with his tongue tripping. It was like that, and at the same time /not/. She was so surprised when she realized this that she didn't pull away.   
  
Seamus nodded to himself and said in a singsong way, "Brownbrownbrownbrown." just like that, four times like winding up a charm.   
  
"Why are you like this?"   
  
Seamus reached forward and asked in a hushed whisper, "Have you ever read Peter Pan?" As if it might be a very important question. He didn't wait for her answer, however, but jumped on his skittish way, "Why than, Wendy, here is your kiss."   
  
For a moment Hermione was afraid he really was going to kiss her. She shut her eyes and waited. In another moment she opened them, to find Seamus grinning at her as though he was very close to laughing.   
  
"Put out your hand." He demanded.   
  
She did, without understanding why she was following the orders of a deranged boy. Seamus leaned forward and placed a small box the size of a book of matches in her open palm.   
  
"Take this with two drops of moonlight, five kilowatts of stardust and--" he shook his head violently, "No, Hermione, you need something like this." He forced her fingers closed around it and shrugged. "You're so uptight, and that's not pretty."   
  
The back of her throat clenched and Hermione would have thrown the box back at Seamus if she hadn't been so desperately curious. "I don't /have/ to be pretty you-you-you chauvinist!"   
  
Seamus looked thoughtful, and then his voice broke in a giggle. "Sorry, sorry, but the whole world should be as pretty as me." He started up to his dormitory room, leaving Hermione confused and cautious, violently curious and hesitant and extremely contradictory.   
  
"What is it?" Hermione looked up the stairs, her cheeks tight with the desire to /know/ the answer to all things.   
  
"This 's doubledipped sweet, this 's sugarcoated rock candy. Gag-me sweet." He nodded at her as he looked over his shoulder and down the stairs. Seamus rolled his eyes back into his head and groaned sweet ecstasy, so real and passionate that it startled Hermione, crawled under her skin and disturbed her too.   
  
***   
  
"I see..." Hermione whispered, shutting off her flashlight, surprised she remembered how. "Said the blind man to the wall." She licked the inside of her mouth and wiped her lips against her shoulder.   
  
Her fingers were shaking as she pulled open the button on her robe pocket and grasped the plastic box within. She brought it out and snapped open the lid of the little box. It was too dark to see the lacquered Monet print of water lilies on the lid, but she had seen those before, she wanted to see what was inside, this time.   
  
She shut her book, with ashes down the spine and smoke dust in the ink.-Her book, what book? She wasn't holding a book, no, ah, then where was the dust from?   
  
Or ashes, that was it, from gold cigarettes, the powder clung to the tips of her fingers, gold. Pan gave it to her, this exotic gold dust. Draco the pixie, Pan the sweet... she kissed the back of her hand, unfocused and let fly. Red attract moth-eyed glow, bugs on the flashlight.   
  
'Neville Venus!' she shouted inwardly, adding a quick jumble of, 'Lavender Amazon, Mcgonagall Diana, Ginny Marmalade.'   
  
She hesitated before suggesting to the shadows around her, "Call me Hermione Mars, I am God of War."   
  
The ridiculousness of it all failed to dawn on her. She sighed and brushed her hands across her lips, tasting tree dust. "No, that's not so, no, no, down here… here we all are, alive, waiting for them to prove we are not a fish..." She tipped her face up, flashlight on it, pulling some ghoulish campfire face, "That's it, God, prove to me I am not a fish." She almost laughed, but felt too peevish to want to laugh at anything.   
  
"Prove to me I'm a girl…" She added, and then realized that this question was more important to her. She buried her face in her hands for a moment and thought about the oceans that might have covered this place how many millions of years ago, all the jellyfish and clown fish and deep sea squids might well have floated right past her. How come she'd never heard of the ghost of an ocean? Might be very spooky, that, to have a whole ocean around you, but all dead long ago, and just wobbling past, shadow fishies, those little lamp-headed fish with lights on their whiskers, yes, she could see it very clearly.   
  
She never dreamt of ghosts, or fish, or boys even.   
  
She had dreamt of the girls often enough. Plural. Not just one pathetic obsession, but it seemed like roomfuls of them. Pansy, with her sweet eyes and her awful voice, Cho with dark hair and her distracting hips, the Parvati twins-no, no, she had always imagined those two together, anyway, four hands, two mouths, four eyes. Well, it proved she could count up to forty anyway, twenty fingers, twenty naked brown toes. But wouldn't they be a lovely mirror image of eachother? How could that be different from masturbation, when it's to your own face, your own hands holding onto your own reflection…   
  
She squirmed and though about Ginny. Ginny. Ginny. Ginny was the only one she had acted on at all, because Ginny was /just/ pathetic enough to say yes, just desperate enough to open up. Just easy enough. Everything else she would work at, but love or women, no, she'd take the easiest and figure that out before she even though of tackling Lavender.   
  
It had been a stolen kiss, a not-long-enough blurt of a kiss, awkward as hell and it had miss the point of kissing. It was a First Kiss to /be/ a first kiss, and lost almost all meaning.   
  
She hadn't let go of the idea of a really good kiss though, and she found Ginny willing to try at least once more.   
  
She actually curled up in her bed one night, curtains closed, and kissed the back of her wrist, and tried to shape her fingers like the mouth she wanted to touch. But her lipless hand felt hard compared to Ginny's soft skin. Like the skin of a raspberry. And just as red, sometimes, when she blushed so hot-   
  
Their lips touched and Ginny had blushed so hot that Hermione could feel the heat under her fingertips on Ginny's cheeks like a fever.   
  
"'Mione, Mione, Mione, my only…" she slipped her hands through her hair, tucking her pinkies around the corners of her glasses-new, new for the summer, what a great way to start the summer, tightening of the brace wires and the wire-rimmed spectacles that made her think of Harry by not being the least bit similar to his. It made her feel fidgety, and copycattish, even though her flat tiny ovals were new, lightweight metal, perfectly perched on her nose at a level she could peer through studiously. They made her look even more serious, and no-nonsense. That was supposed to be a good thing. She had taken to carrying a pocket-handkerchief to wipe them off, because the tiny plates of glass collected dust like nobody's business.   
  
Her parents told her they made her look distinguished. Her younger cousin had asked, "Why are you wearing those?" What, did they think she was just faking it?   
  
She jerked the glasses away from her eyes, everything blurred, she felt as if some part of herself blurred in the light. She wondered why she had the light on at all, why she wanted to see the dim drippy interior of a moldering treehouse.   
  
To be totally honest, why even get glasses when all there was to see was-the other side of the mountain, the other side of the mountain. The bear, the bear went over the mountain!   
  
She suddenly giggled and started to sing, surprised she remembered the tune so easily, "The bear went over the mountain, the bear went over the mountain, the bear went over the mountain, to see what he could see, to see what he could see, and all that he could see…" she stopped and leaned her head back, sucking in her cheeks. She put her glasses back on and turned the flashlight off, feeling up the wall-oh if only it weren't such an innocent wall, she would kiss it. She found a place where the wall ended, folded outward into a window, pane-less, of course because you don't put glass in a treehouse. She felt the warm stickiness of the air outside, fresher and sweeter then the molding air inside. She leaned out the window, arching herself, imagining herself the figurehead of a ship, swaying, by herself, not in the breezes that ruffled the outermost layers of the tree.   
  
Hissing breath, hissing night, hissing eyes, she saw the moon, the moon was bright, she saw the stars, just bright enough to show up, between clouds, between the shreds and patches of night like tiny white islands.   
  
"And all that she could see," She shut her eyes. "Was the other side of the mountain." She whispered at the sky, not singing, only confiding, belatedly.   
  
Thick as the night was the light was still faster then the heat and when it changed suddenly all she gasped, it was so big when she looked up. 


End file.
